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MojoPac – Potentially Great Software with Serious Flaws

The ability to run Surfulater from a USB Stick is something our users and I would like to see. It is easy to carry around your Knowledge Base files on a USB stick or even use them directly from a USB stick, but there are times when you are using someone else’s PC and want to use Surfulater. One way to accomplish this is to run it on the USB stick. However there are hurdles to overcome, primarily in respect to licensing and conversely piracy. We need to ensure that our customers can use their copy of Surfulater on a USB stick, but prevent unlicensed use, and that’s the difficult part.

To my knowledge only U3 USB sticks provide the capabilities software developers need to adequately protect their software on USB sticks, however there is a reasonable amount of effort required to get your software working on U3 devices and I’ve read where some folks aren’t all that happy with the way U3 works and about it not working in some corporate environments. So I’ve shied away from this as a solution and have been looking at alternative ways of meeting the need to access Surfulater Knowledge Bases on different PC’s. For example providing the ability to view KB’s in a Web Browser, without needing Surfulater installed at all. I’m also working on synchronization, which will make it a breeze to use the same KB’s at work and at home.

So what’s this about MojoPac? My friend Leigh Wardle e-mailed me yesterday to tell me he had Surfulater running on a USB stick using a new product called MojoPac and my reaction was wow, followed by how! I couldn’t see how they could protect licensed software from being pirated by copying the MojoPac installation. I told Leigh of my concerns and he promptly e-mailed me back an excerpt from their Web site that indicated the software was protected by locking it to the serial number of the USB device, and therefore copying it to another USB stick wouldn’t work. I thought ok that sounds great I really need to give this thing a try. Unfortunately it was downhill from there.

I duly registered on the MojoPac web site and downloaded the software. My first problem was that I wasn’t able to install it on my 1G Corsair Flash Voyager USB stick because it doesn’t have a serial number. That’s fine and good, as without a serial number they can’t provide the protection software developers need.

I tried another USB device and it worked a treat. Start it up and you get a clean, brand spanking new instance of Windows XP running. I have to tell you I was impressed, and still am.

Next I installed Surfulater and after a small hiccup it installed and ran perfectly. I exited MojoPac, moved the USB device to another PC and started it there and again it worked a treat. Next I activated the Surfulater license to get it from a Trial Version to a Full Version and did some more testing, which all went fine.

Then I moved the USB drive back to the original PC, started MojoPac and Surfulater and Surfulater ran as a Free Trial when it should have been fully licensed! This is problem number one. In essence any software that uses protection techniques that check for various installed hardware will likely not work with MojoPac, as it stands. This is because a MojoPac system includes a mix of the underlying PC’s hardware plus its own emulated or virtual hardware. To resolve this the underlying hardware should not be visible in MojoPac. I think you’ll find a fair bit of commercial software won’t work, because of this. But things get worse.

I kept thinking that relying on a serial number alone to protect MojoPac and all the licensed software installed therein couldn’t be adequate and it didn’t take long to prove that I was right.

I went back to my original Corsair USB stick (without a serial number) and installed a virtual drive. This looks to Windows like a real drive and includes a serial number. MojoPac installed and ran fine on this, and my initial reaction was great. But then reality set in. I can copy this virtual drive to another USB stick or hard drive, or post it on the Internet for others to use, and MojoPac works.

This means that MojoPac itself is easy to copy (pirate) and use without paying for it, but the far bigger problem for me as a commercial software developer, is that it makes my software just as easy to copy and use for free. Surfulater won’t run on a different hardware configuration as I mentioned above, which is a MojoPac failing they need to resolve, but other licensed software I tried works perfectly.

I really don’t want to rain on their parade as I see MojoPac has great potential if these issues can be resolved, but my feeling is that the underlying issues will be difficult to fix. The MojoPac Web site tells us they’ve got some very clever people working there and they are nicely cashed up with VC Funds, so resources shouldn’t be a problem (yeah I’m jealous I know). As things stand right now they need to take some urgent action before they get into serious hot water. If it were my product I’d remove it from the market untiil I could address these issues.

There also seems to be discontentment brewing over on the MojoPac Support Forums, with company representatives AWOL. Hopefully they’ll return soon.

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Evaluating Software from a Users Perspective

Jonathon Giebeler has very recently discovered and purchased Surfulater and made a really interesting post over on another forum, where Surfulater related software is being discussed. I have to admit I mentioned this discussion to Jonathon during an exchange of e-mails, as I thought it would be of interest to him. I had no idea the outcome would be a very enthusiastic post about Surfulater and also a discussion on how Jonathon evaluates software. I follow a very similar evaluation process to Jonathon, but mostly use search engines to locate products, not software sites.

My guess is that most people are fairly ruthless when evaluating software, I know I certainly am. Jonathon’s point 5 “If the UI sucks – uninstall the program” rings true to my ears. Very few people give first impressions a second chance. I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that Surfulater has the best UI around town and as sure as I’m sitting here writing this, there will be people who have uninstalled Surfulater as quickly as they installed it, but hopefully not too many.

 Without further ado here is Jonathon’s post in its entirety:

Just a quick note on this.  During the last few weeks I downloaded a ton of programs (including the ones discussed at the beginning of this thread).  I don’t see what the interest in MyBase is?  I installed this program and promptly uninstalled it because I didn’t see anything I wanted to use. 

In my view (perhaps different from yours because I am an architect/law student).  I want a nice UI and easy access to my information.  The information is what it is all about.  As far as a text only programs there should be not discussion.  There are a ton of text editors that all do the same thing.  What is important is a tool that will allow you to gather information from everywhere (the web included) organize it (usually trees) and link it. Obviously the ability to grab information from the internet is important (because there is so much information out there) but you need to also be able to use simple text or import from other sources, docs, pdfs, etc. 

With this said, I am placing my bet on Surfulater.  I down loaded this program with about 20 others and it is still installed.  My process for evaluating is as follows:
1. Go to download.com and do a general search so you get as many results as possible (then do it again so you do miss it)
2. Go through the hundreds of results, read the descriptions, look at screenshots, visit homepages, and finally download promising programs.
3. Install all the promising programs (I do it while I am searching)
4. Gather all the new shortcuts on the desktop, and open each of the programs
5. If the UI sucks – uninstall the program
6. Take a closer feature look at each of the remaining programs.  Can you import the information you want? Does it work well with other programs? Can you input data easily (i.e. is the structure of the program not so restrictive that it takes to long to input simple date), etc, etc,

I did this, and have already deleted many “promising” programs.  Surfulater is still running and here is  why:

It is a web companion yes, but I can also use it to input practically anything else with the attachment and clipboard utility.  To understand the features you’d have to try it.  A good quick view of the possibly it to look at the help section – it was created in the program and is obviously not just clippings from the web.

Here are a few features I loved:
1. I can create many different “books” (that’s what I am calling them).  I have created, Projects, Personal, School, and AEC.  The books are displayed as colored tabs along the top so I can quickly switch between each, and in each book I can have as many articles and folders I want. 
2. It is the best for capturing web articles.  I can download just the part I selected, the selection and the page (which appears as a thumbnail by the imported selection), or the selection and a link to the page.  The title automatically is inserted as well as a link.
3. Here come the best features – accessibility to data – to any note I can add comments, a reference, attachments, or “see also” (which creates a bi directional link to another article. 
4. Visibility – I have never seen this feature but I love it.  Next to each of the items noted above there is a minimize button so I can hide, the article and just view my comments, links, etc.  Also if I click on the “Roofs” folder I can see all the sub articles instantly without having to select each separately.
5. The clip board tool.  I am working on a project with about 100 pages of restrictions, and I am using Surfulater to organize these.  I scanned the document into PDF format.  When I read something I need to reference, I select it and copy it, then I go to Surfulater and create a new article base on this selection, then I put in my comments, i.e. what we are going to do to comply with the requirement

Anyway the possibilities are endless.  I really never write reviews for programs, but I am just extremely impressed with Surfulater.  I haven’t found a program quite like it, and if you guys really want the best editor  – information compiler- possible, I would at least try it.  I still don’t understand what you liked about MyBase.  I chose “General knowledge Base 2.2” over MyBase, and even that has been replaced by Surfulater…did I miss something?  I don’t remember being impressed.

Thanks Jonathon, the cheque is in the mail. 😉

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Our first release for 2006. An exciting year ahead.

A new year and the first of many new releases await with V1.94, B0.0 ready to go. As each week comes and goes we get more and more people finding out about Surfulater and the terrific capabilities it has to make saving and building knowledge so quick and easy.

For a product like Surfulater to be a success and thrive we need to keep building our customer base, which takes time. And of course to turn folks into customers, we must produce a product they want, one that meets a need and isn’t a pain in the backside to use. It is clear from the feedback we keep receiving that we are on the right track, both in meeting a need and having a product that is nice and easy to use.

One of our newest customers is Ville-Matti Niemi from Finland who wrote the following a few days back.

Hi Mr Franks

Thanks for your email and the fantastic product. My freetime is currently continuing studying utilizing the internet, and Surfulater is the best help i can imagine and ever used. I’ve been using it now for some days and i can say the program is worth every penny i paid for it.

Congrats for a very good, useful and first of all, very well made program.

Best regards and season’s greetings from the snowwy Finland.

Surfulater has proved itself popular in other ways too, with the last release being downloaded a record number over 12,400 times in just over two weeks. Most of these of were from China and other parts of Asia and if you haven’t guessed by now these were people trying to get a pirated copy. The same thing happened earlier in the year! It is very nice to be popular, but this isn’t quite the sort of popularity we are after as it doesn’t help our bottom line and diverts our attention away from what we need to be doing.

I received a great response to my recent post Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road, both in comments, e-mails and posts on other forums. Respondents were impressed to see the level of openness put forward, which is apparently unusual in the ranks of software developers. I’ve always been forthright in my writing as I don’t want folks to think that we might be doing something that we’re not. This blog is a new and interesting way of communicating with you and I hope you get as much out of reading it as I do in its writing.

One area where we are stumbling a bit is getting people to appreciate all that Surfulater can do. When my good friend Sue Robinson suggested the name Surfulater, I took to it straight away, and I still think it is a great name. The problem is Surfulater does more than just save content from web pages, especially with all the new clipboard capabilities that make it so easy to capture information from other Windows Applications. Plus you can manage other information like todo lists, contact lists, music catalogues etc. The name “Surfulater” is a bit of a hindrance to get the broader message out, something we just need to keep working on.

I’m excited about seeing where Surfulater goes in 2006. Number one priority is not to deviate from our overriding goals of keeping Surfulater simple and staying focused on what Surfulater is all about – capturing information so you have a permanent record all in one place where you can easily find stuff again.

Fundamental to Surfulater’s future are suggestions from our users, so please do give us your thoughts. It won’t cost you a cent and the rewards could be… well, rewarding.

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Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road

I’ve been asked to write about my vision for Surfulater and decided a Blog post would be a good place for this. I’m afraid it is a bit long winded as I want to lay down some background material so readers will know where I am coming from. I’m told vision statements contain lots of motherhood gobbledygook. Excuse me for excluding such fluff and for not being as visionary as some may like.

I’ve been designing, developing and publishing software for over 20 years. For a number of years I worked with a team of programmers on vertical market applications, in a company of which I was a director. For the past 15 years I’ve worked predominantly on my own, on a product named ED for Windows which is a full featured programmer’s editor. ED is a very large and complex application, with a large and diverse user base who place many demands on it. It is a highly configurable application and can be extended via a built-in scripting language. It also supports some 35+ programming languages. Bottom line – a big, complex, powerful application that most people will never fully utilize.

For quite some time I’d been keen to develop other products and I finally made a small start in late 2003. I spend a lot of time on the Internet researching all manner of things. A lot of the time it is to do with programming, but also business, travel and other personal interests. I was very frustrated by the poor tools available to collect and save information that I found while surfing, and needless to say Bookmarks and Favorites just don’t cut it. So the idea for Surfulater was born. Continue reading “Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road”

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If your software was on a date…

Monday mornings can be a hard slog, especially when you’ve worked a bit on the weekend and it is hard to know where the working week starts and ends, sometimes. That said I’ve had quite a good morning this Monday morning and am that much closer to the next Surfulater release.

I did hit a small roadblock though, stopped for a Coffee and hit the Blogs and my day has well and truly been made by a post by Kathy Sierra over at Creating passionate users titled If your software was on a date….

Kathy asks

“How would your software (or product, service, book, cause, etc.) behave on a date?” 

and goes on to list her “Dating Rules For Software” which include:

  • Look your best
  • Be fun. Don’t be negative. Be the one others want to be around.
  • Be trustworthy and consistent.
  • Don’t be fake.
  • Be polite, be helpful.
  • Be forgiving.
  • Be sensitive, be a good listener.
  • Don’t assume I’m an expert.
  • Be fun.
  • Don’t assume there’s no competition.
  • Check your ego with the valet parking attendant.
  • Married people really DO have more sex.

I loved reading this, the rules are down-to-earth, simple and sensible,yet so many software products would score poorly when judged against them. The explanations for each rule are a delight to read. It reminded me of “ABOUT FACE, THE ESSENTIALS OF USER INTERFACE DESIGN” by Alan Cooper which is a must read for all software developers. My approach to the design and implementation of the user interface for Surfulater was certainly influenced by Alan’s book.

I’d like to think Surfulater scores reasonably well against Kathy’s dating rules, but it is up to our users to pass judgment not me. I’d love to hear what you think.

Time to get back to working on my dating skills.

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I guess it had to happen

Back in June we put out a Press Release on Surfulater, which unfortunately didn’t get much coverage. I did however create a new opportunity for Spammers who must harvest e-mail addresses on Press Releases, but that’s another story for another day.

Over the weekend I was doing some Web searching and came across a mention of the press release and a link to it. The “I guess it had to happen” bit is the web site was all about surfing of the kind you do in the water, not on the web, and it was an Italian web site to boot. 🙂

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Google Base is coming

Google is trialling a new service named Google Base that allows people to post and make searchable any type of content. You can post events, housing, jobs, products, second-hand vehicles etc. This seems like yet another step in Google’s relentless march for domination of the Net.In a description on the Google Base site, the company described the service as

Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free. 

To quote Infoworld

The service could put Google in competition with online auctioneer EBay Inc., which recently bought a minority share of Craigslist Inc., a classified listings site, observers say. EBay, based in San Jose, Calif., bought a 25 percent stake in San Francisco-based Craigslist, which covers a wide range of categories from jobs and apartments to used cars and personals. 

Other comments mention the rumoured Google Office and how you’ll be able to use it to edit content you place in Google Base.Google wants your car listings, events, etc. at ZDNet covers some more ground. I’m sure we will all be hearing a lot more about this is the coming days and months and like everything Google does we’ll watch and wait with interest.

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Web 2.0 Conference 2005

If you are involved or have an interest in software or web development you have most likely heard mention of Web 2.0. I started hearing about Web 2.0 earlier in the year and to be honest I don’t have much of a feel for what it is about just yet, apart from it being the next big thing happening to the Web.

Earlier this month the Web 2.0 Conference 2005 was held in San Francisco and from what I’ve read so far it would have been a great conference to attend. I’ve just finished reading a brief wrap up of the conference titled The Future Of The Web over at Information Week. Here are a few quotes I found interesting.

Jeff Weiner, senior VP of search and marketplace at Yahoo acknowledges that the Web 2.0 concept, much discussed of late, has been overhyped. But, he adds, there’s something to it.

If you take O’Reilly’s analysis at face value, the “Web 2.0” is about lots of things that client-server computing, or even the Internet, for the most part, hasn’t been. Instead of pages that load, it’s about sites that feel like software. Instead of software that runs in a browser or on a cell phone, it’s about apps that span devices. Instead of being all about content from Web producers, it’s about content being produced by people everywhere: blogs, wikis, digital photos. Web 2.0 is about viral marketing instead of advertising, though that sounds suspiciously like 1999. And it’s about the power of networks and the ability to deliver better results as more people use a service (think Google’s search, Amazon .com’s ratings, or Technorati’s blog commons).

Aaron Ricadela’s take on a 12-page treatise by Tim O’Reilly on what version 2.0 of the Web really means.

It’s either the start of something cool–or Internet Bubble 2.0. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Thomas Claburn

The article is well worth reading. It will be interesting to follow Web 2.0’s progress and see where Surfulater fits into it.

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We’re back from abroad

We are back from our big trip to Europe and getting back into the normal swing of full time work again. We did have a fantastic time and were fortunate to visit a treasure trove of amazing places. A very few highlights include Pont du Gard where Cherryl said I had an epiphany and she was right, Provence in general, Cinque Terre, Chianti, Florence and especially Venice. When you go to Venice make sure you visit Palazzo Ducale and grab an audio player. We visited many fine Churches, Cathedrals, Galleries and the like but Palazzo Ducale really stands out for me. The Borghese Gallery comes in a very close second though.

Our Notebook PC’s and other technology behaved well while we were on the road and we were able to provide near our usual high level of support, keep all the wheels in motion and our customers satisfied. This was a worry before we left and I’m reassured now that we are back that all of our planning and preparation paid off.

We are certainly rested, refreshed and enlightened and looking forward to getting back to work on the next release of Surfulater. Customer feedback is very good with so many of you telling us what a great program Surfulater is. A heartfelt personal thank you to you all. And please do keep the comments coming.

Finally a quick hello to everyone we met on our travels. Lets hope we catch up again some day somewhere.

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On the road again

I’m travelling overseas at present on a much needed and well earned break. Getting connected to the Internet while travelling is way, way easier than 5+ years back, but even still it isn’t anywhere near as easy as I’d like.

In some places we had a 24/7 broadband connection just like back home, but unfortunately this has been the exception not the rule. And of course the best laid plans don’t always work out as they are supposed to. Continue reading “On the road again”